The Rashāyida Arabs vs. the State: The Impact of European Colonialism on a Small-Scale Society in Sudan and Eritrea

Abstract

The Rashāyida Arabs vs. the State: The Impact of European Colonialism on a Small-Scale Society in Sudan and Eritrea William C. Young Studies of European colonialism in Africa often focus on the transformation of large-scale institutions during and after the colonial period. Country-wide economic changes, the growth of nationalist movements and other political trends, and the tensions between military and political forces are all carefully described at the macroscopic, national level.1 Yet colonialism has an impact on the microscopic levels of family, village, and tribe as well. Historians often find it difficult to document the effects of colonialism at a microscopic level, however. Small social formations such as villages and tribes rarely produce the detailed written records needed by historians to reconstruct social transformations. Anthropologists, who excel at producing extremely detailed accounts of local political and economic systems, can provide much information about the microscopic level but only for a relatively short period.2 To see how colonialism affects the local level over a long term, we must combine the data and methods of historians with those of anthropologists and other social scientists.3 This paper represents an attempt to apply these methods to a particular case: that of the Rashāyida Arabs during the colonial period in Sudan and Eritrea (1866–1993). It complements the recent work by Gewald on the colonial reconstruction of “tribes” in western Eritrea, slightly to the west of the areas discussed in this paper, during the 1940s.4 The Rashāyida of Eritrea and Sudan are descended from Arabic-speaking Bedouin who migrated from a variety of locations on the Arabian side of the Red Sea in the late 1860s and settled in what is now Sudan and Eritrea. The Rashāyida are not numerous. It is estimated that there were about 40,000 Rashāyida in Sudan and probably fewer than that in Eritrea in 1980.5 Despite their small numbers, they have managed to preserve their de facto independence from both Eritrea and Sudan. Their current independence can only be understood in light of the history of the frontier zone between Sudan and Eritrea. At the time when the Rashāyida reached the African coast of the Red Sea, it was contested by two empires: the Ottoman empire – represented locally by Egyptian forces – and the central Ethiopian state ruled by Emperor Tēwodros (Theodore) II.6 The Egyptians wanted to expand the territory of neighboring Sudan, which they had invaded and conquered in 1821. They also wanted to strengthen their hold on the port cities of Sawākin and Massawa, which they had controlled on-and-off since 1811.7 Although the Red Sea coast was nominally under Ottoman administration from 1827 to 1865, the actual power there was often Egypt. Regardless, it was not until 1866 that the Ottomans ceded the two ports to the Egyptian government, and it was only then that Egypt felt free to develop them and integrate them more fully into the Egyptian economy. Egypt believed that the two ports would prosper after the completion of the Suez Canal, which was opened shortly afterward, in 1869. As for the Ethiopians, they were concerned that Ottoman and/or Egyptian control of the Red Sea coast would block Ethiopian trade with Britain and stifle economic expansion.8 Thus it must have seemed to the Rashāyida, when they arrived on the scene in the late 1860s, that the two main forces that they would have to contend with were the Egyptians on the coast and the Ethiopians in the interior. Within twenty years, however, the situation changed completely. The coastal strip on which they had settled was divided between two colonial states: the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (with a garrison in Sawākin, to the north) and the Italian colony of Eritrea (with its headquarters in Massawa, to the south). At the same time, the revolt of the Mahdi and his followers against Egyptian rule in 1882 briefly transformed Sudan into a theocratic state with expansionist, messianic goals. Mahdist campaigns in eastern Sudan pushed the Rashāyida out of the grazing lands that they had exploited for the twenty years after their first arrival and...